“Immigration is not a service we provide to the rest of the world.”
Heather Mac Donald made that statement near the close of her remarks at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Fla., on Feb. 18, 2015, as quoted in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College. I chose it as the lede for this column, in which I marshal some of her salient points and some of my own thoughts to address the continuing controversy about immigration policy. Ms. Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes for several newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She is the author of three books, including (with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga) The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s.
First, a little background: We have a written constitution in order to provide for a government of laws, not of men. By that we mean a government that no one person or one branch of government can arbitrarily manipulate, a government whose laws are written and open for all to read, laws applied to all, even to government officials, impartially and with an even hand.
The same ideal is applied to sports and other competitive activities: the rules are written and understood by all, with events supervised by officials who apply the rules equally to all participants. Now imagine a game or other competitive event in which either there are no rules, and an official capriciously awards points and assesses penalties by whim and by his/her desire to control the outcome; or alternatively, there are rules, but the official arbitrarily chooses to enforce or not to enforce them as it suits his/her purpose, that being again to make sure his/her favorite wins. Such a situation would be equivalent to a government of men, not of laws. Such governments can be called absolutism or tyranny or dictatorship.
America, under the Obama administration, has written laws (indeed, perhaps too many), but the enforcement of the laws has become arbitrary and capricious, handled in a manner calculated to favor some, to the disadvantage of others. We are dangerously close to becoming a government of men, not of laws.
Today, we face a constitutional crisis. President Obama has declared that because Congress has not granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S., he will do it himself. This is an astoundingly lawless action, a bold defiance of the Constitution’s separation of the powers of government.
In Article 2, Section 3, of the Constitution we read that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision assumes that there is a law for the president to execute. However, in this case, Obama is faced with the absence of a law granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. Far from executing an existing law, Obama is creating one — a function the Constitution explicitly allocates to Congress and to Congress alone. If this power grab is allowed to stand, we will have moved very far in the direction of rule by a dictator. The absence of a law granting amnesty is not a lack that must somehow be made up for by unilateral executive action. Rather, it shows the lack of a popular consensus regarding amnesty. There is no political will for such an amnesty.
Although Obama’s amnesty by fiat is the most open and egregious example of defiance of immigration law, a series of events that have gone largely unnoticed may have an even greater impact on the country over time. The Secure Communities program and deportation in general have been under attack for some time. As a result, the insistence by so many conservatives that we must “secure the borders” is a naïve delusion.
A perfectly secure border is a physical impossibility. Some number of people will always find a way to cross. If, once they have crossed, nothing can be done, then we may as well not have a border. That’s why the advocates for illegal immigrants have concentrated on fighting deportation, rather than fighting border security; they know that emasculating the former is far more important.
The Secure Communities program is a commonsense response to illegal alien criminality. Any time an illegal alien is booked into a local jail, suspected of a crime, an alert is automatically sent to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. ICE agents can then lodge a federal detainer, asking that the jail or prison briefly hold the illegal alien at the end of his sentence, rather than releasing him, so that ICE can pick him up and start deportation proceedings.
Such a program should be utterly uncontroversial. Anyone who enters our country illegally has voluntarily assumed the risk of deportation and has no claim to undisturbed presence here. An illegal alien who goes on to break other laws has even less claim to any right to remain in this country. Yet, since its inception, Secure Communities has been the target of protests and agitation by illegal alien advocates. Incredibly, they claim that it is unfair to remove an illegal alien who also commits other crimes.
Even more astonishing is the fact that nearly 300 jurisdictions across this nation agree, openly refusing to honor ICE’s requests for detainers. They have released tens of thousands of criminals back onto the streets, where they easily avoid detection. Even when ICE is notified, the results are dismal. In 2012 — the last year for which we have complete figures – the agency was notified of over 400,000 illegal jail detainees, of whom just 19 percent were removed. About 50 percent of the criminal aliens ICE elects not to deport reoffend upon release.
The ultimate aim of the campaign against Secure Communities is to delegitimize deportation entirely as a response to illegal immigration. If it is morally unacceptable to expel even a convicted illegal alien criminal, then it is all the more unacceptable to repatriate someone who has “merely” crossed the border illegally or overstayed a visa. Undermining the moral basis of deportation is behind the astounding claim that Americans are to blame for separating families, not the alien who knowingly came into the country in violation of our laws and assumed the risk of being sent home.
Despite the Obama administration’s claims, deportation has basically ceased in the interior of the country. In 2014, 0.5 percent of illegal aliens who were not explicit ICE priorities were actually deported. Only deportation corrects the original offense and deters further violations. That is why Mexico, along with virtually every other country, practices it unapologetically. If we voluntarily forswear deportation, as we are doing, we will have surrendered control of our immigration policy to others, and along with it, our national sovereignty.
So, what should we do? First of all, we must reassert the rule of law. At the very least, that means rehabilitating deportation and ceasing to cater to illegal immigrants with sanctuary policies and non-enforcement of existing laws.
Amnesty for those who have voluntarily chosen to violate the law is neither just nor wise, since every amnesty, both in the U.S. and Europe, has had only one effect: more illegal immigration. People who come into the country illegally or overstay their visas knowingly and voluntarily assume the risk of illegal status; it is not our moral responsibility to remove it. Birthright citizenship is a judicial error, never intended when the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, specifically to grant citizenship to former slaves. The illegal status of the parents of children born here will eventually be resolved as that generation dies out.
We should also reorient our legal immigration system towards skilled immigrants like the parents of Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. Canada, Australia and other countries have already taken this step and are enjoying the benefits. Immigration policy should be forged with one consideration in mind: America’s economic self-interest. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants and will continue to be one, but rewarding illegal immigrants does an injustice to the many who played by the rules to get here. We owe it to them and to ourselves to adhere to the law.
Lawlessness breeds more lawlessness. Once a people or a government decides to normalize one form of lawbreaking, that trend will continue until finally the rule of law itself is profoundly jeopardized.
Source :http://www.eacourier.com/opinion/omnibus-let-s-talk-sense-about-immigration/article_08e4b4c6-0975-11e5-8980-a33d06734e35.html
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